I first noticed the parking sensors when I pulled into my garage one night.

It was quite late, and I was a little tired from driving for about an hour in traffic. (In what has become an overpopulated area of Minneapolis, traffic can be heavy even after local restaurants close for the night.)

I live in a chalet style house, which means the garage is below the main house (and is rather small). Parking is not difficult, but the closer you inch forward, the better.

As I pulled forward, I made sure the green line matched up with the side of my garage stall. The lights flashed green, then yellow, then red.

If there was a garage parking attendant motioning with batons, it would not have been any easier.

Even though I was a bit tired, I pulled in all the way until it seemed like I had only a few inches to spare. Note that, with other vehicles, there might be a forward-mounted camera and visual aids, but not quite this many.

My wife remarked that the beeping is annoying. I mentioned how it is more annoying to ding the front bumper or to close the garage door and have it hit the rear bumper.

Yet, autonomous driving can take many forms. A Tesla Model S can already pull into a garage on its own, and many Ford models can auto-park for you.

I’m more inclined to think the sensors and visual aids will help us as we continue to operate the car – say, providing more assistance for cornering on a highway, moving out of the way if a car approaches in a parking lot, and braking more often.

Let’s say I’m at home and a UPS truck pulls into my driveway. What if my car recognized I was getting a new television delivered? What if the car knew it had to move not just into the garage, but perhaps into the right stall instead of the left – to make it easier to move the television?

Those are the advancements I’d like to see next – not fully autonomous, but AI-empowered. Cars that do the work for us, like moving on their own or even rising up to avoid road-kill.

We’ll see how long that takes, but convenience features like that will make the technology even more compelling.

Fortunately, the Q50S includes the basic Around View Monitor (AVM) with Moving Object Detection (MOD) and Front and Rear Sonar Systems in the Q50S, which runs $52,495. The base model without all of the tech features costs $34,200.

On The Roadis TechRadar's regular look at the futuristic tech in today's hottest cars. John Brandon, a journalist who's been writing about cars for 12 years, puts a new car and its cutting-edge tech through the paces every week. One goal: To find out which new technologies will lead us to fully autonomous vehicles.